New Democratic midterm strategy: Attack the GOP over “personhood” bills

posted at 6:01 pm on April 15, 2014 by Allahpundit

Some righties are laughing about this on Twitter (Democrats against … personhood?), and granted, it’s a transparently desperate shiny-object attempt to change the subject from O-Care and the economy. But strategically it’s not half-bad, a decent play from a weak hand. They already owe not one but two of their swing-state Senate seats, in Missouri and Indiana, to Republican gaffes involving conception and rape. Go figure that they’d turn to conception again to try to minimize what looks like heavy losses in the Senate.

The issue isn’t being discussed at all by Washington prognosticators these days. But you can bet that some of the most hard fought Senate races this fall will feature big fights over “Personhood” measures, which have declared that full human rights begin at the moment of fertilization.

A number of GOP Senate candidates are on record supporting Personhood in some form. Once primary season is over, and the Senate general elections get underway in earnest, you are likely to see Democrats attack Republicans over the issue — broadening the battle for female voters beyond issues such as pay equity to include an emotionally fraught cultural argument that Dems have used to their advantage in the past.

This has already appeared in the Colorado Senate race, but it will likely become an issue in other races, too. In Colorado, the Republican candidate, GOP Rep. Cory Gardner, renounced his previous support for Personhood after entering the contest, admitting it would “restrict contraception,” but Dems seized on the reversal to argue that Gardner only supports protecting women’s health when politically necessary…

Jennifer Duffy, who analyzes Senate races for the non-partisan Cook Political Report, tells me Dems will likely use Personhood to appeal to persuadable GOP-leaning women — even as they push a women’s economic agenda designed to boost core turnout among female base voters.

Follow the link for more examples of Republicans who are up in November supporting “personhood” bills. The new strategy is, of course, all about women: Kristen Soltis Anderson notes today at the Daily Beast that one big difference for the GOP between 2010 and 2014 is that women voters seem to be sticking with Democrats this time. Four years ago, a Quinnipiac poll in March found almost no gender gap on the generic ballot; two weeks ago, they found men splitting 42/35 for Republicans and women splitting 44/34 for Democrats. At the very least, a “personhood” campaign might help preserve some of that advantage with women as we get closer to November. If they’re really lucky, some Republican candidate will pull an Akin and say something stupid that the party can demagogue in races across the country. The strategic virtue of a “personhood” campaign is that it implicates contraception, not just abortion, so it lends itself easily to a “Republicans are coming for The Pill” scare tactic. That’s worth a few votes.

None of this will stop the GOP from picking up seats but it might stop them from picking up enough to gain control of the Senate. And even if Republicans gain control, Democrats holding one or two extra seats that they otherwise would have lost if not for the “war on women” shtick will be hugely useful to them in 2016. Remember, the landscape that year is as favorable to Dems as the current one is to Republicans. Unless they get creamed six months from now and lose so many seats that the hole becomes too big for them to climb out of in one cycle, they’ll be heavy favorites to win a Senate majority two years from now. For the left, this year is all about minimizing losses and salvaging the seats they can. In which case, in the interest of triage, why not go after personhood bills? What else are they going to talk about? This?

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They can’t run on Obamacare. They can’t run on the economy. Income inequality has fizzled. The racism card is lame. Somehow, I don’t think they’re going to do any better being the champions of baby butchering, and denying equal rights for the most helpless and innocent among us. Just ask Wendy Davis.

I have no idea why the GOP plays abortion so dumb. They play like they’re scared to admit they’re pro-life and in doing so let the Democrats control the issue.

It’s not hard to turn the tables: most Democrats oppose any and all restrictions on abortion. Describe what a partial birth abortion entails and then accuse your opponent of being pro-infanticide (which they are).

Use their own playbook against them. Pick a position that’s abhorrent to 80% of the electorate and hammer them with it all autumn long.

You know what…if Republicans can’t win because moron voters fall for stuff like this. Well then the country is already doomed, and let’s just put the Dems in charge and get the complete collapse and following revolution started sooner rather than later.

I am so sick of national elections ignoring everybody and everything except the goddamned gays, vaginas, and illegals.

But aforesaid gays, vaginas, and illegals are more than happy to be pampered. My gay friends hate Obama but so long as he talks their talk, he has their votes. They really are that selfish. Ditto many of my women friends. I don’t know any illegals.

the Republican candidate, GOP Rep. Cory Gardner, renounced his previous support for Personhood after entering the contest, admitting it would “restrict contraception,” but Dems seized on the reversal to argue that Gardner only supports protecting women’s health when politically necessary…

The whole point of “personhood” laws is to determine whether a criminal who attacks and injures a pregnant woman badly enough that the fetus is killed can be charged with murder of the unborn baby. Or if a criminal kills a pregnant woman, can he be charged with two murders instead of one. This has NOTHING to do with abortion, in which the mother willingly submits to allowing her baby’s life to be ended.

Republicans can still be pro-life while avoiding the Akin/Mourdock trap, if they’re well-prepared. Opposing ALL abortions is ideologically pure but a political loser, because Democrats will always bring up the case of a rape victim forced to keep the child of her attacker. Many women are pro-life concerning a baby they willingly conceived with a man they love, but also fear being raped and don’t want some politician telling them they MUST carry for 9 months a horrible reminder of the trauma of rape.

The truth is, babies conceived in rape represent only a very small percentage of total abortions. While a total abortion ban is a political loser, a ban on abortions except in cases of rape, incest, and danger to the life of the mother has 60+% support in polls, including among women. A candidate who advocates such a policy can be honestly pro-life, and save well over 95% of the babies now lost to abortion, while reassuring women that they will not be forced to carry the child if they are raped. A lot more women FEAR rape than actually ARE raped, but the FEAR drives the vote toward Democrats. What’s more, a candidate supporting such a position has a good chance of being elected, and if supporters of such a position have a majority in Congress, this could become law.

We can be pro-life purists, and lose election after election, and never pass any laws against abortion. Or we can be pragmatic pro-lifers, willing to allow some abortions in extreme cases, win elections, and eventually save 95% of the babies now aborted.

Republicans can still be pro-life while avoiding the Akin/Mourdock trap, if they’re well-prepared. Opposing ALL abortions is ideologically pure but a political loser, because Democrats will always bring up the case of a rape victim forced to keep the child of her attacker. Many women are pro-life concerning a baby they willingly conceived with a man they love, but also fear being raped and don’t want some politician telling them they MUST carry for 9 months a horrible reminder of the trauma of rape.

The truth is, babies conceived in rape represent only a very small percentage of total abortions. While a total abortion ban is a political loser, a ban on abortions except in cases of rape, incest, and danger to the life of the mother has 60+% support in polls, including among women. A candidate who advocates such a policy can be honestly pro-life, and save well over 95% of the babies now lost to abortion, while reassuring women that they will not be forced to carry the child if they are raped. A lot more women FEAR rape than actually ARE raped, but the FEAR drives the vote toward Democrats. What’s more, a candidate supporting such a position has a good chance of being elected, and if supporters of such a position have a majority in Congress, this could become law.

We can be pro-life purists, and lose election after election, and never pass any laws against abortion. Or we can be pragmatic pro-lifers, willing to allow some abortions in extreme cases, win elections, and eventually save 95% of the babies now aborted.

Steve Z on April 15, 2014 at 7:08 PM

I’d agree that opposing abortion in the event of life of the mother is a loser. I disagree on rape and incest though. The real question is why a baby deserves to die for the wrongdoings of others. It’s anathema to moral principle to punish the innocent for the crimes of the corrupt, and that’s something where I think the GOP can make a very compelling case.

Just more war on women nonsense. All you can do is chuckle at the sheer absurdity of it all, a major political party in America being reduced to arguing against babies as people. Think about that for a second.

Of course, they’ve convinced far too many women that everything is an attack on their genitalia, so who knows, it may work.

Just more war on women nonsense. All you can do is chuckle at the sheer absurdity of it all, a major political party in America being reduced to arguing against babies as people. Think about that for a second.

Of course, they’ve convinced far too many women that everything is an attack on their genitalia, so who knows, it may work.

changer1701 on April 15, 2014 at 8:04 PM

Would men ever fall for a political attack that says “X is coming after your testicles!”?

The GOP and the broader right has mounted no viable, sustainable, logical response to any of their idiotic screeching or their manipulation of young people’s impressionable views. This isn’t a new problem, either.

Rape and incest problems? Look, you have had SIX MONTHS to figure it out. What is the problem?

That leaves a tiny number of medical conditions for the last three months, and the difference of condition of a third trimester fetus in the womb that threatens the life of a mother can be decided upon by the participants. Mind you, at the point a fetus can be removed and sustained outside the woman’s body, then the medical condition has that remedy.

You can even index when abortions are no longer allowed to that point where a fetus can be sustained outside the host body. Probably have to put in a week or two leeway. Any abortions after that point would be killing an innocent, manslaughter at the very least if not intentional and, if done intentionally, murder. This would require mothers to keep records of their activities in case they think that they may not want to have a child… to document that they are only a period of time along in their gestation cycle below the limit. Otherwise you will need a few independent physicians to give you a best guess… and that might take a few weeks to do.

This is using the logic of Roe v Wade, which the SCOTUS says you can’t use for anything else and slapping them around with a dead fish: use the exact same logic and change the status to a minor citizen with all the protections of a minor citizen.

Abortions are horrific, yes.

And they are so unregulated that we get horror houses that are ill-kept, unsanitary, and kill not just babies born alive but mothers as well. Yet if you try to clean them up, make them keep records, and report on documentation of any sort you are called misogynist or anti-woman. Even the most minimal of standards are routinely rejected… and no one on the right has ever tried to regulate abortion clinics to have them as clean as any other damned medical facility. Why not?

Isn’t the way to finally make people realize that this is a life changing decision is to give it some status so that good records are kept, sanitary conditions are inspected and that minors who have abortions have them investigated to find out who defiled them?

If the Left pushing abortions everywhere is a horror, then what is not paying attention to putting more than one innocent life at peril during such procedures via unregulated establishments? Or do we really like Gosnell charnel houses so much as to leave such things without even a few standards to be held accountable to? Why not rip a page out from the Left and start to regulate this horror AWAY over time, slowly but surely, piece by piece? Or is that too hard to do because it requires constant attention and actually doing something other than protesting and putting up laws to get knocked down? Put something up that will stick and by that method it can be brought down. Who is going to vote AGAINST the protection of the life of a mother during an abortion? Because we have that problem as well.

The reason Republicans always fall into this trap is that they never make the distinction between biological “life” and legal “personhood.” The former clearly informs the latter, but they have been distinct substantively since Roe. If a newly-fertilized egg is a “person” with full legal rights, including the right of self-preservation, then a potentially irreconcilable conflict exists between mother and child during the entirety of pregnancy. The best example is the ectopic pregnancy. A continuation of such a pregnancy will result in the death of the mother. Abortion is, in this instance, the only possible treatment. If the child is a person, however, there is no way to reconcile his or her right of self-preservation with the same right possessed by the mother without doing real damage to the right itself by recognizing an exception. The “born alive” rule actually operated well to protect both mother and child by recognizing legal personhood only when birth rendered the child no longer a potential mortal threat to the mother. Personhood statutes should be supported as an appropriate response to the damage done by Roe to this traditional understanding, but supporters should make sure that their focus is on protecting children that the vast majority of Americans, including women, consider to be in need of such protection. Ask Wendy Davis how she is doing with Texas women after fighting for abortions after 20 weeks/5 months.

Well, this is one woman who the Dems aren’t going to win over the personhood issue. I paid attention in school, in both my Anatomy/Physiology class and my AP Government class. That means that I know what science says about the beginning of biological life, and I know what the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments say about its protection.

Personally, I’d rather not reside in a society whose weakest, and innocent, members can be executed at a whim.

This reminds me of my strategy: Draft an “Everything Good and Decent” bill in the House and then ask the Dems why they are voting against “Everything Good and Decent”?

The comes the campaign to get Harry Reid to refrain from “killing” “Everything Good and Decent”, and then castigate any Dem that votes against “Everything Good and Decent!!” (perhaps we can even get exclamation points in the Bill’s name)

Furthermore, I think it’s a dangerous thing to make the legal definition of “personhood” different from the scientific definition of human life. If the legal definition is arbitrary, then it can be changed at any time to include or exclude any category. The best definition of personhood, therefore, is that if you are human and alive, you are a person.

I would like to think that we are incapable of committing atrocities on the level of Nazi Germany, but I’m not that naïve. This slippery slope is very real, and to not recognize it is to flirt with societal destruction. I’m well aware of how paranoid that makes me sound, but when we stop recognizing certain members of society as human, we begin to lose our humanity.

We can be pro-life purists, and lose election after election, and never pass any laws against abortion. Or we can be pragmatic pro-lifers, willing to allow some abortions in extreme cases, win elections, and eventually save 95% of the babies now aborted.

Steve Z on April 15, 2014 at 7:08 PM

It would seem that your primary allegiance is to party rather than to morality. Instead of treating the pre-born human as a political football, we should be treating him as a human.

Why should it make any difference how one is conceived? How is a human produced by rape any different from one produced by love? Why should a human’s life generated by an immoral (and even violent) act be denied basic rights that other humans enjoy (or should enjoy)?

My respect goes to the party who maintains integrity, and supporting the slaughter of innocents simply due to the circumstance of their conception is arbitrary and repugnant (and shows a lack of integrity).

Fertilization is a foolish or questionable place to consider “personhood”.

At what point would you consider personhood to begin, if not at the start of the human being’s existence?

A woman has sex, there is conception… she is unaware for a week, and is injured at a sports event. The doctor notices she has miscarried the tiny fetal tissue.

Do we charge her with murder? Negligence? Child abuse? Manslaughter?

What do you charge parents with when their baby dies of SIDS? Is accidental death a foreign concept to you unless you’re presenting personhood hypotheticals?

If she was negligent and killed a child, there would certainly be charges… but here? Charges would be absurd.

No kidding.

What about an IUD? Murder? It prevents the implantation of a fertilized egg (which would be a person) and forces it to die doesn’t it?

Yep. In addition to being poisonous for women, IUDs destroy innocent human lives. You can clutch your pearls all day long at the prospect of banning them, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that they destroy human lives. What are you going to do about it? Just not care?

Now if you use a more rational standard (Row v Wade “viability”), then you’ve got something that makes sense.

Babies regularly survive well before the 24-week viability standard laid out in Roe. Further, Blackmun in writing the majority punted on when human life begins. The decision is a scientifically illiterate travesty, and only a fool would rely on it for any sort of cohesive standard on human life. You implicitly acknowledge this in the paragraph after the one I just quoted.

We need something to clarify beating a pregnant woman to a miscarriage is clearly (at some point) murder, not just “unwanted medical care”, so some rights are useful.

So the child killed matters when a man punches him to death, but not when his own mother pays a different man to rip him out of the womb limb from limb? What sort of reasoning is that?

Full “personhood” at second 1 after sex however is not where a rational line should (in my view) be drawn for legal/legislative matters.

Furthermore, I think it’s a dangerous thing to make the legal definition of “personhood” different from the scientific definition of human life. If the legal definition is arbitrary, then it can be changed at any time to include or exclude any category. The best definition of personhood, therefore, is that if you are human and alive, you are a person.

I would like to think that we are incapable of committing atrocities on the level of Nazi Germany, but I’m not that naïve. This slippery slope is very real, and to not recognize it is to flirt with societal destruction. I’m well aware of how paranoid that makes me sound, but when we stop recognizing certain members of society as human, we begin to lose our humanity.

Cheshire_Kat on April 15, 2014 at 10:28 PM

So you want to give fetuses the right to vote? That’s what you’d do if you made the two definitions the same.

So you want to give fetuses the right to vote? That’s what you’d do if you made the two definitions the same.

jim56 on April 16, 2014 at 12:19 PM

I’m not so sure.. by that logic, all Americans under age 18 aren’t persons since they cannot vote.

This is a weird thought I had…
Since it is fairly evident that us Americans want to be nannied, why not take on that role? Mandate all post-puberty women to be on some form of birth control. Provide it at the taxpayer’s dime (already are through Obamacare). If someone can prove they became pregnant while being on birth control, they can have a subsidized pregnancy and adopt the child. This way, there is no need for abortions because all women having sex will have protection, except for those women that stop taking birth control to have babies.

It’s a terrible, fascist idea that would really show the lack of personal responsibility we take in our lives… but what alternative is there to prevent the millions of unnecessary abortions?

The whole point of “personhood” laws is to determine whether a criminal who attacks and injures a pregnant woman badly enough that the fetus is killed can be charged with murder of the unborn baby. Or if a criminal kills a pregnant woman, can he be charged with two murders instead of one. This has NOTHING to do with abortion, in which the mother willingly submits to allowing her baby’s life to be ended.

…….

The truth is, babies conceived in rape represent only a very small percentage of total abortions. While a total abortion ban is a political loser, a ban on abortions except in cases of rape, incest, and danger to the life of the mother has 60+% support in polls, including among women. A candidate who advocates such a policy can be honestly pro-life, and save well over 95% of the babies now lost to abortion, while reassuring women that they will not be forced to carry the child if they are raped. A lot more women FEAR rape than actually ARE raped, but the FEAR drives the vote toward Democrats. What’s more, a candidate supporting such a position has a good chance of being elected, and if supporters of such a position have a majority in Congress, this could become law.

…..
Steve Z on April 15, 2014 at 7:08 PM

You’re confusing fetal homicide laws with the proposed personhood laws. The personhood law could interfere with some forms of contraception:

SEC. 2. RIGHT TO LIFE.

To implement equal protection for the right to life of each born and preborn human person, and pursuant to the duty and authority of the Congress, including Congress’ power under article I, section 8, to make necessary and proper laws, and Congress’ power under section 5 of the 14th article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the Congress hereby declares that the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution is vested in each human being. However, nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize the prosecution of any woman for the death of her unborn child.

SEC. 3. DEFINITIONS.

For purposes of this Act:
(1) HUMAN PERSON; HUMAN BEING- The terms `human person’ and `human being’ include each and every member of the species homo sapiens at all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment at which an individual member of the human species comes into being….